Disclosure Forced To Explain Mimed Performance At UK Festival

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Breakout British dance band (and New Music To Know act) Disclosure took to Facebook this week to explain why they mimed a recent show at London’s Wembley Arena as part of the Capital FM Summertime Ball.

According to the Guardian, the controversy came to a head on the Facebook group page for I Love Bass, where a fan posted a photo of the band onstage with unplugged cords clearly visible. After more fans expressed disappointment at the “faked” set, Disclosure member Guy Lawrence jumped into the fray of comments to explain their side of the story.

“Capital FM made us do this show with a backing track playing but allowed the vocalists to sing,” he wrote. “They said that they had to trigger the tracks themselves to sync visuals. We pleaded with them for weeks and weeks to let us play fully live or at least let us mix but they just weren’t having it. You will also notice this was the same for a lot of the dance acts playing that day.

“It was incredibly frustrating and horrible for us to hear our music at Wembley and not actually be able to play it ourselves, as anyone with any knowledge about disclosure knows that we play fully live seen here,” he added, providing clips to Disclosure performing on BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge as well as an hour-long live DJ mix.

Emphasizing that the band never attempted to make the performance appear live (“We left the f***ing plug on the floor on purpose, didnt even plug phono leads into the master out, turned all the EQs fully down and the master out AND DIDNT EVEN TAKE HEADPHONES for god sake!!”), Lawrence ended the screed with a shout-out to the Capital FM radio station for being “amazing to us and they play our songs roughly 400 times a week across their various networks and we wanted to thank them for all the support.”